BY
The Goethe Institute in Israel thought it had a great idea. Why not observe the 84th anniversary of Kristallnacht by convening a panel discussion on the Shoah and the Nakba, and how we – you, me, everybody — are to understand the “pain of the others”? There must have been many who gasped at the insensitivity of the effort, the massive miscomprehension of it, the cruelty of the inadmissible comparison. How flabbergasting, some must have thought, since any one of sense knows what is wrong with this pairing of the Holocaust with the Nakba; apparently, however, no one of sense works at the Goethe Institute of Israel. The story of this outrage can be found here: “German institute lashed for Tel Aviv ‘Shoah, Nakba’ event on date of Kristallnacht,” by Lazar Berman, Times of Israel, November 8, 2022:
After withering criticism from Israeli and German officials, the Goethe-Institut Israel on Tuesday postponed an upcoming event, “Grasping the Pain of the Others – Panel Discussion on the Holocaust, Nakba and German Remembrance Culture,” which had been set to take place in Tel Aviv on Wednesday evening — the 84th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
“Postponed” the event so that it would no longer coincide with the anniversary of Kristallnacht? That wasn’t good enough. It needed to be cancelled, period, shame and sorrow expressed, resignations – or firings — announced. Nothing else would do.
On November 10, the Goethe Institute cancelled the event. But it did not express sorrow or shame. And no one has been fired at the Institute for this travesty.
The remembrance of the Shoah and the commemoration of the victims is a major concern of the Goethe-Institut, to which we devote ourselves in numerous projects,” the institute said in a German-language statement. “We regret that the choice of date for a panel discussion has currently caused irritation.”
The new date for the event in Tel Aviv is Sunday, November 13.
The Goethe Institute at first merely “postponed” this morally intolerable event so that it wouldn’t coincide with the anniversary of Kristallnacht. That was not good enough. It needed to be cancelled, period, shame and sorrow expressed, resignations – or firings — announced.
Shame and sorrow need to be expressed by the German government that is responsible for the Goethe Institutes worldwide.
“The Goethe-Institut stands for understanding and dialogue,” the statement continued, “That is what the planned discussion is about.”
What kind of “understanding” did the Goethe Institute hope to further? That the Shoah and the Nakba can be mentioned in the same breath? What sort of “dialogue” is possible between those who know what the Shoah was, and those who claim that their “suffering” in the Nakba was the equal of that of Jews in the Shoah?
The Goethe-Institut is the cultural arm of Germany and is intended to facilitate cultural exchanges around the globe.
While first delaying, and then finally cancelling, the event, the Goethe Institute did not address criticism of the equivalency drawn between the Holocaust and the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the name Palestinians and many Israeli Arabs use for the Arab defeat in the 1948 Israeli Independence War, which led to the establishment of the Jewish state.
The Foreign Ministry had earlier in the day blasted “the blatant cheapening of Holocaust and the cynical and manipulative attempt to create a linkage whose entire purpose is to defame Israel,” by discussing the Shoah and the Nakba in the same breath.
Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan called the event itself an “intolerable distortion of the Holocaust.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Yad Vashem chairman were both right. Yes, the evening as planned — moving the date to November 13 changed nothing – represented an “intolerable distortion of the Holocaust” and yes, as conceived it would have been a “blatant cheapening of the Holocaust” and “a cynical and manipulative attempt to create a linkage whose entire purpose is to defame Israel.” The Palestinians, and other Arabs, too, routinely claim that Israelis treat Palestinians the way that the Nazis treated the Jews,” a claim so absurd that many can be forgiven for thinking it not worth rebutting. I can sympathize with that belief. But nonetheless, consider that recent polls reveal that 2/3 of young Americans (18-30 years old) do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust. Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.
Given such widespread ignorance, we have a duty to present the same facts over and over again, ad nauseam, because even the most basic facts about the Holocaust are insufficiently known. We need to keep in mind not just the ignorance, but the moral miscomprehension of so many, the inability to make what should be obvious distinctions between the Shoah and he Nakba, the semi-demented acceptance of this. grotesque comparison. Just look at the Goethe Institute. Despite the uproar, its first thought was to still planned on holding the event just a few days later, so as not to coincide with Kristallnacht. But in the end, the criticism proved too withering; the event was cancelled.
So let’s go over it all again. The Shoah, as many Jews call it, or the Holocaust, as most of us call it, are the names we give to the murder by the Germans, aided and abetted by willing collaborators in a dozen European states, of more than six million Jewish men, women, and children, in an attempt to wipe out all the world’s Jews, beginning with those in Europe. The victims were gassed to death by millions by breathing in Zyklon-B in the “showers,” burned alive in crematoria, suffocated to death in the locked cattle cars (the Nazi Kurt Gerstein witnessed the unloading of 45 cattle cars crowded with 6,700 Jews deported from the Lwow Ghetto less than a hundred kilometers away from the extermination camp at Belzec, of whom 1,450 were already dead on arrival from suffocation and thirst), shot to death by bullets to the back of the head – only one per customer, bitte! – as they stood naked by open pits, into which they would then topple, they were gassed as well with carbon monoxide in the mobile killing vans on the eastern front, had chloroform or phenol injected into their hearts, were tortured and then hung up on meat hooks in abattoirs (that was great fun, especially for the Iron Guard in Bucharest). Jewish fathers were forced to carry the heads of their decapitated children through mobs of jeering German soldiers, Jewish babies were taken from their mothers and thrown up in the air to be shot (who knew the Nazis so enjoyed skeet shooting?), or were caught on the end of bayonets., and so many more atrocities each more horrible than the next, that were carried out, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Treblinka, and a half-dozen other extermination camps.
Jewish twins in Auschwitz underwent special treatments at the hands of “Uncle Mengele,” as he had the little Jewish children call him – that is, the smiling angel of death, having the time of his life in Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele.
What does Wikipedia tell us about Dr. Mengele? Here’s what: “The experiments he performed on twins included unnecessary amputation of limbs, intentionally infecting one twin with typhus or some other disease, and transfusing the blood of one twin into the other. Many of the victims died while undergoing these procedures, and those who survived the experiments were sometimes killed and their bodies dissected once Mengele had no further use for them. Nyiszli recalled one occasion on which Mengele personally killed fourteen twins in one night by injecting their hearts with chloroform. If one twin died from disease, he would kill the other twin to allow comparative post-mortem reports to be produced for research purposes.
Mengele’s eye experiments included attempts to change the eye color by injecting chemicals into the eyes of living subjects, and he killed people with heterochromatic eyes so that the eyes could be removed and sent to Berlin for study. Many of his victims were dispatched to the gas chambers after about two weeks, and their skeletons were sent to Berlin for further analysis. Mengele sought out pregnant women, on whom he would perform experiments before sending them to the gas chambers. Alex Dekel, a survivor, reports witnessing Mengele performing vivisection without anesthesia, removing hearts and stomachs of victims.
There’s so much more, so unbelievably more, but you get the picture. That was the Shoah, the cruelest event in human history.
How does that compare with the “Nakba” that the Goethe Institute thinks should be mentioned in the same breathe with the Shoah? The “Nakba” or “Catastrophe” is how the Arabs refer to their failure to destroy the nascent state of Israel in the 1948 war and to kill, or expel, all of its Jews. The five Arab armies of Egypt, Tranjordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, that invaded Israel simultaneously on May 15, 1948, were clear about what they were going to accomplish. It was Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, who set out what the Arabs hoped to achieve. “This war,” he said, “will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.”
It was not to be. The Jews defended their little country, threw back the invaders, in the north and in the south, and only in the east did they lose territory in Judea and Samaria, renamed “the West Bank” by the Jordanians in 1950, to the British-officered Arab Legion.
That’s what made the Arabs so deserving of sympathy, as they see it, just as much, or even more so, than the victims of the Shoah. Some Palestinians o have taken to calling the “Nakba” the worst crime in history. Mahmoud Abbas just this year, addressing the UN General Assembly, accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” with the Palestinians as their victims. But there were no death camps, no gas chambers, no mobile killing units, no crematoria, no medical experiments, for the Arabs to endure..A total of 3,700 Palestinians died in the 1948 war. Almost all of them were not civilians, not women and children, but soldiers fighting and dying in battle. The Arabs claim there were “massacres” of civilians. There was exactly one massacre for which we have some evidence, of Arabs killed by Jews, and even that one has been questioned by historians. That was Deir Yassin, where approximately 100 Arab men, women, and children are claimed to have died.. It is still unclear if this was indeed a “massacre” as the Arabs claim, or if those deaths resulted from a ten-hour battle in which civilians were caught in the middle, as the researchers Professor Eliezer Tauber, author of “The Massacre That Never Was,” and Professor Uri Milstein claim, after sifting the evidence. But even if we were to accept the Arab version, that there was indeed a “massacre” in the middle of a battle, in a war for Israel’s survival, how do 100 Arabs killed in that war compare to the six million Jewish men, women, and children, who were tortured, gassed, burned, shot, smothered to death?
Whoever at the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv had the bright idea for this grotesque event, even if it has now been cancelled, should be fired forthwith. Or perhaps better still, that person or persons should be reassigned to the Goethe Institute in Tehran, where a much more receptive audience awaits. That may be punishment enough.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.